[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Tim Fadden]

On 1/10/2014 8:10 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net> wrote:
>> I believe a Coco is powerful enough, it just doesn't have enough memory to
>> composite a page.
>>
>> A CoCo 3 in Turbo mode with a 2 meg upgrade could probably print simple text
>> based pages, and upscale CoCo resolution graphics pages. The limiting factor
>> would be the serial port speed, rather than the processor speed.
>>
>> Especially, if it was equipped with a hard drive and used a page file.
>>
>> I used to sell LaserMaster Printers that did this on 386 based computers,
>> and this is how an Atari-ST printed to a Laser printer through the DMA port
>> with a limit of 2mb of RAM.
>>
> Ok.. I think I am understanding your proposal.. stop me if I get it wrong :)
>
> You're saying that the CoCo probably could drive a modern printer in a
> limited fashion, given enough ram etc.  *but* your idea was not that
> we actually try to do that.  Your idea was that we could take the
> output that CoCo programs already produce and connect the bitbanger
> they already use to a PC takes this "legacy" output and drives a
> modern printer.  Is that accurate?  I hope I'm getting it, because we
> could easily do this with just a couple changes to DriveWire.
>
> DW already knows how to render one type of output (fx80), and the
> framework supports adding more printer emulations if they were
> written.

Wrong kind of output though.  It outputs to a pdf file, not the raw 
output needed to drive the printer.  And If you send it a file larger 
than one page, you only get the first page.

Not that I belittle what does, just stating a fact.  If there were some 
way to send the raw data to a printer instead of a pdf file, that might 
prove interesting.

> It also already connects to the bitbanger.  So the only remaining
> issue is that DW ties up the bitbanger for itself (this is actually
> the reason I ever began work on DW4, although it was because I wanted
> to use the bitbanger for telecom stuff, not printing).
>
> We can easily add a function in DriveWire that allows the CoCo or the
> user to say "hey Drivewire, I want to use the bitbanger to print
> something".  DW can then kick the serial poty down to the proper bps
> speed and feed bytes to the emulated printer it already has.  When the
> print job is done, the user or coco would need to tell DW to become
> "normal" again.
>
> There is a conflict if the program needs to read from the disk before
> it's done sending the print job.  We could detect this situation
> easily enough in the disk io routines, but I'm not sure if there is
> any simple way to make things work properly.  I will think about that.
>
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Tim